may marry
Imogen.

Posthumus in Rome wagers with Iachimo that Imogen is of an
incomparable chastity. Iachimo comes to England, and by a trick
obtains evidence that convinces Posthumus that Imogen is unchaste.
Imogen, cast off by her husband, comes to the mountains where
Belarius rears Cymbeline's two lost sons. Cloten, pursuing her, is
killed by one of the sons.

The Romans land to exact tribute. The valour of Belarius and the
two boys obtains a British victory. The Romans are vanquished.
Cymbeline's queen kills herself. Posthumus is taught that Iachimo
deceived him. Imogen is restored to him. The lost sons are restored
to Cymbeline. Prophecy is fulfilled and pardon given. All ends
happily.

It seems possible that Cymbeline was begun as a tragedy during the great
mood of tragical creation, then laid aside unfinished, from some
failure in the vision, or change in the creative mood, and brought to an
end later in a new spirit, perhaps in another place, in the country,
away from the life which makes writing alive. It is the least perfect of
the later plays. The least soft of Shakespeare's critics calls it
"unresisting imbecility." It is perhaps the first composed of the
romantic plays with which Shakespeare ended his life's work.

Though the writing is so careless and the construction so loose that no
one can think of it as a finished play, it has dramatic scenes, one
faultless lyric, and many marks of beauty. It deals with the
Shakespearean subject of craft working upon a want of faith for personal
ends, and being defeated, when almost successful, by something simple
and instinctive in human nature. It is thus not unlike _Othello_; but in
_Othello_ the subject is simple, and the treatment purely tragic. In
_Cymbeline_ the subject is only partly extricated, and the treatment is
coloured with romance, with that strange, touching, very Shakespearean
romance, of the thing long lost beautifully recovered before the end,
so that the last years of the chief man in the play may be happy and
complete. The end of life would be as happy as the beginning if the dead
might be given back to us. Shakespeare had lost a child.

There can be no doubt that when the play was first conceived, the craft
of the queen, working upon the insufficient faith of Cymbeline, was
designed to be as important to the action as the craft of Iachimo
working upon the insufficient faith of